The plant-based egg market is up 167% according to the Plant Based Foods Association. Arturo Elizondo, CEO of Clara Foods® and I discuss the disruption happening in the egg market and the desperate need for a shift to eggs without the chickens…in our lifetime! Tune in to this week’s episode of The Plantbased Business Hour.
Arturo and I also discuss
- What is Clara Foods?
- What is the a-cellular process and how do you get protein from it?
- What is the environmental impact of the egg industry?
- Why is there less waste, more reliability, more versatility and better performance with Clara Foods’ egg whites?
- Who is buying Clara Foods’ egg whites?
- Plant-based eggs are up 167% to a (small) $27M. Are you seeing the same kind of growth in B2B?
- Will you produce anything beyond egg whites and pepsin?
- What are your predictions for the plant-based egg market in the next 5 years? Do you foresee cellular eggs?
- and more!
Did you know?
- It can take 2000 liters of water for 12 eggs.
2. A hen will lay 24-42 a year in nature and 278 eggs a year in factory farms. Don’t let the cage free, certified humane and free-roaming slogans fool you. It is an abysmal, reproductive slavery, painful life…nothing humane about it.
3. Chickens can recognize up to 100 animal and human faces.
Here is a short clip from our long-form interview above with an accompanying transcript.
Elysabeth: Arturo thanks for being with me. How many companies that you’re dealing with right now realize or admit or compute the negative impacts that these industries have?
Arturo Elizondo: I mean I think at the end of the day they all get that using animals is not ideal. I wouldn’t say maybe that the environmental or ethical dilemmas are the key drivers. I think ultimately companies want to make money and they want to exist. They don’t want to disappear and consumers are really changing, right? And I can’t underscore this enough, that the power of the consumer is incredible. In the last five years, one huge tailwind for us as a B2B business has been that almost every major company that’s headquartered in North America has publicly committed to going cage free by 2025.
McDonalds uses over two billion eggs just in the US and Canada every single year. Walmart, Sodexo, Compass, the largest food service companies, Starbucks, Burger King, Taco Bell, Kelloggs and General Mills; every major company has publicly committed to going cage free and that introduces a whole new host of challenges because [being cage free means it is ] a lot more expensive because chickens can now move, which is crazy. They can move so they’re now consuming more feed which raises the cost of production and then you cannot cram as many chickens anymore into a single factory farm and so the supply chain becomes incredibly more complex. And what’s really exciting is that because these companies are already transitioning, we can more or less intercept the process and say, “Look you’re already transitioning to cage free, why not just leap frog that and go straight to animal free?”
Elysabeth: Well, yes, because I would think if you are the person behind the bottom line you would say, “Cage free is a step backwards for me but Clara Foods is a step forward in terms of the bottom line profitability.” So, I would imagine that the consumer preferences and their outspokenness, particularly since Covid, is one tailwind but also the cost of resources used for multinational corporations as they start to contemplate a growing population is another.
There’s going to be a high demand on water. There’s not so much land. There’s going to be more and more pressure on carbon footprint transparency. We don’t see it yet in the retail situation but you’re going to have to start putting your carbon footprint on your packages at some point. That’s at least going to be a marketing advantage for some. I mean, these things are really putting pressure on businesses to realize or finally put into effect the fact that animal agriculture is a wasteful business equation.
For plant-based media/branding consulting and public speaking, reach out at elysabeth@elysabethalfano.com. For more information, visit ElysabethAlfano.com.
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